blog entry

.mov movie file ::: .flv video file ::: video page on blip.tv

Ian's video was called time travel. this initially brought to mind the Orbital song with the Star Trek TNG "Time Squared" episode sample for the Mobius & time becoming a loop. the past few weeks have felt like this for me - I've gone back to 2000, 2001, and hopefully 2003 this week if all goes well.

then I also thought about "Moving Time" as I might be moving house soon

but the theme I went with for the final video (though I sneaked the Mobius quote in the title text..) was the H.P. Lovecraft book "Shadow out of time". we read this for an online class I'm taking, and I really enjoyed it

I thought about Plato's ideas of "remembering knowledge" across the aeons (time travel of the mind?)

one of the other class members mentioned the mental projections and mind swaps & the data-body and likened the spaces between dream/reality in the book, to the virtual spaces common these days & how we often have a data-body these days as well as a flesh-body

so I then thought about outsourcing memory using photos, videos, blogs etc and how by uploading these we become a virtual self on the internet. and how sometimes these things can become cluttered and cross-over each other and even annoying after a while (as I think watching this loop for 1:30 is.. but this is on purpose :), and they're not an exact copy of ourselves. and how sometimes these things can overshadow our real selves, or at least other's impressions of our selves. and how, when watching something on loop you sometimes focus on the foreground moving text, and other times 'me' - this seems to match my real world experiences too - shifting between online me & real-world me focuses

I represented the data-body using text words as this is the medium of the book. using Isadora I made a controller that would move the words around the screen - often blotting out the video of me playing in the background. but it's not really me - it's another virtual image -> mirror image of me, rather than the me I imagine in my mind, distorted by the join in the two glass mirrors and my face is covered most of the time by the camera - the recording of the data-body.

the video is playing on loop with my washing machine as the soundtrack.

using footage of 'me' in the video was inspired by Cheryl's videos, as this is unusal for my videos, so I looked forwards & backwards for inspiration - as in the book, Peaslee & the Yithians look forward & backwards in time for knowledge

vlomo09 day15

vlomo09 30/30 project

15/11/2009

over to you Cheryl! good luck

this video is day 15's video for Rupert Howe's 30 days - 30 people - 30 videos vlomo09 project - watch other people's videos at http://videobloggers.mirocommunity.org/category/30-days-30-people-30-videos
& #vlomo09 / #navlopomo09 videos at http://videobloggers.mirocommunity.org/category/navlopomo09

:::

"Fairy Tales - retold by Bridget Hadaway" book - these are from my favourite Fairy Tales book when I was a child. I went back to Brisbane last weekend and stayed at Mum's place and was talking about Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales books and had Mum kept our books and then I found this one. my favourite stories were Princess and the Pea, Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves, and The Little Mermaid. I LOVED the illustrations and I remembered them better than the stories I think. the other stories and illustrations in the book are great too, but these three are the ones I remember most - especially The Little Mermaid - I used to read that one over and over.

Fairy Tales - retold by Bridget Hadaway
ISBN 0 7064 0374 6 - First published by Octopus Books Ltd, 59 Grosvenor Street, London W1 in 1974

I took a video from the train on the Wednesday Sydney awoke to the red dust storm and then another on the next day. the videos were taken with my nokia n95 camera, so it lost most of the redness, but you can see that the sky was dustier than the clear Thursday. they're not completely in sync, because I wanted dune day to be slightly ahead of clear day, so you can watch it from left to right and see the scene & colours change as your eye reaches the second panel. I'm not sure if this effect worked as well as I planned though - perhaps I should have lined them up so they were in sync after all.

made with Isadora - the 20090929_dune-day_clear-day.izz patch is attached

I always have problems saving the Isadora video files as they always lose video quality and end up with lots of compression artifacts. I tried exporting at 5% rate, but it somehow increased the framerate and sped up the video! so this was saved at 95%.

other videos taken on the day - with my sony camera so the colours show up properly :

GE AR - augmented reality
I tried playing this AR video at home tonight and it worked! this is the first attempt so the video I took is a bit dodgy but it gives an idea. the cat was purring whilst I was recording and kept nudging my head. I tried blowing on the mic but couldn't get the windmill blades to spin. try it out! now I want to try make my own!!
thanks to @LukeSnarl for tweeting the link

http://vimeo.com/4764743 :

GE AR - augmented reality from kath on Vimeo.

GE page
- print out the marker
- u might need to upgrade your flash player to v10
- turn on your webcam (mac - do this with flash player not photobooth - read the help tips on the url for help)
- launch wind power or solar energy links
(if you just see the green oval spinning then it probably can't see your camera)
- hold the marker printout so it's facing your webcam.. then watch the 3d images appear!

http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

http://bit.ly/9V5hV is a better video demo (clearer than what I've done - but I wanted to try it myself)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00FGtH5nkxM

luke sent me a great AR game by Julian Oliver (NZ) :
http://vimeo.com/1320756 :

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

this is amazing!
he's made a game using cubes - called Levelhead - it's won all sorts of awards (deservedly so!)
he explains it on his website @ http://julianoliver.com/levelhead (& has code for you to try too)

Julian is part of HIT Lab NZ - The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand - from their site it looks like they're doing some pretty cool stuff!!

ARToolKit

ARToolKit
ARToolKit documentation page - with samples, tutorials and background details

helping with a new site - using drupal 6 to build it. it's for a music label. I haven't had a chance to talk to the guys much yet about what they want, so it's very early stages & I'm testing some of the new drupal 6 modules that I haven't used before + some old favourites

I want to try an online store to sell file downloads and physical cds etc

I've been reading Erik Davis' "Techgnosis" book and thinking about MUDs and MOOs again. I used to play on the MOOs back in the early-mid 90s and read up about them again to see if they were still running a while ago : mud articles + moo articles. so I was thinking on the train home last night that twitter seemed very similar - it seems similar to IRC to me, as well as the MUDs/MOOs - the syntax of the commands ie the @ like the @command_name in MUDs/MOOs & IRC. some twitter software uses the auto-reply DM when people follow you, so I was wondering if you could reuse / subvert this to be used in a MOO/MUD on the twitterverse? or even not using DMs, but just open tweets. you could have games running throughout the twitterverse - people could create other worlds within it, using the text descriptions as was done in the MUDs/MOOs

wondering if we could subvert the auto-reply 4 a #twittermoo #twittermud instead - txt based i/f like this reminds me of those text worlds

Inder Salim on reader-l posted about The Mango Tree in his community. some people in his block of flats have 'claimed' the fruit from the tree as their own, and he comments about the validity of this.

at the end of the article, Inder asks, "So has anybody tasted a real mango, if there is one, and if yes, who deserves to eat that, and relish?". I've taken his question as literal and replied with the below post. I didn't comment on the issues that are also mentioned in the article - about people in his community living well together and sharing the fruit of the common tree - breaking down the community social control structures, or regarding some of the children who may not have eaten a mango. on the reader-l, a couple of people commented on some of his terms, calling them racist.

hi Inder, my mango eating experience is also from Australia similar to

I thought it'd be cool to get a personal projector and project videos onto the ceiling of the train for people to watch during the ride to & from work. have a website where people could suggest videos, or perhaps they tweet them or sms. they could rate them too on the site. I was thinking art or landscapes - trainscapes. but I suppose eventually it'd be overtaken by advertisers or spammers. would be nice for a while though! just look at all this ceiling space doing nothing - apart from the bright lighting in the train, this would be ok for an adhoc screen. 29/04/2009

http://blip.tv/file/2050621

yesterday, @DustForEyes posted an "AR scratching" video by vanderlin to stealth board & twitter. it's tagged with tags such as AR, augmented reality, opencv, and openframeworks, so I googled some of these. the AR markers seem like the fiducial markers found in reactable - note there's going to be a performance / demo of one of these called dubtable at ripped next week which would be cool to check out.

audio test

itunes rss feed test - for podcasts/video blogs

- this test is for an audio file - ~10sec of an mp3 file
- attached it to this blog post

itunes sees the post and can play the audio file ok (pc) :
- there's no image file or song details etc but I didn't add any to the mp3 file in itunes

added some details to the song in itunes and reuploaded the file (filesize increases to 227kb)

tonight I'll try installing the 6x itunes module - I think it can add extra fields for itunes rss
then I'll try making a custom view / CCK type

I've been reading my old copy of Localizer 1.0 this weekend - a book compiling art, music, labels, personalities from the early-mid 90s technohouse culture in Europe - mostly Germany, but also including Holland, Norway and other places. I still love much of the music from back then. and also the art works at the parties - below are some examples from Localizer book - I still love these styles. I think maybe I need to go to some more outdoor parties to see them again. to me, it was partly a promise of a new future with technology, music and art, which started in the late 80s (for me). whatever happened to that feeling though? I'm now living with technology, working with it, yet nothing seems that new & fresh anymore. I think it's information overload - new things come out so quickly and with the internet I hear about them too quickly that they don't feel new anymore. I miss the feeling of having to wait for a book to arrive at the store or my mailbox before I found out about something happening elsewhere. /old & jaded rant

any ideas of history/origins of Apollo Space program samples in electronic dance music? (Q via maillist, pls help) http://tinyurl.com/cdx84e

I'm on a maillist which discusses EDM (electronic dance music) and one of the members/list managers, Graham St John (an Australian scholar who has compiled a few books on EDM) has asked about origins of samples from the Apollo Space mission in music. he's asking specifically about dance related music but the discussion has brought up Sun Ra's name. so I was wondering if anyone here knows of examples/history along hip hop / funk /soul / electro (80s, not 2000s) & electronic dance music lines which might help plot the history deeper? (the discussion then went onto alien imagery at some psytrance events but that's another topic)

here's the initial request from Graham St John :
I'm attempting to trace the appeal of Apollo Space Program dialogue

listening to the neofiles Singularitarianism episode # 018 where RU Sirius talks with Eliezer Yudkowsky, director of the Singularity Institute, about the singularity. Yudkowsky's description of the singularity is "the technological creation of smarter than human intelligence, and the resulting jump or discontinuity in human history" ... "it is a particular point in time when we have the first AI, or the first enhanced human that's smarter than anyone in the human race up until then". he mentions, Vernor Vinge, who first coined the term "singularity", "coined it by analogy with the singularity at the centre of a black hole where our model of the laws of physics breaks down - not that physics itself, necessarily breaks down, but our model of the laws of physics breaks down".

New Plymouth Wind Wand from kath on Vimeo

this is the New Plymouth foreshore - sunset and Len Lye's "Wind Wand" sculpture.

footage taken 06/02/2009 during a visit to New Plymouth, New Zealand for the weekend

#videobloggingweek
#videobloggingweek2009

day 7 - sunday

http://vimeo.com/4115679
http://blip.tv/file/1984144

blog entry @
http://www.aliak.com/content/videobloggingweek2009-day7-new-plymouth-win...

easter roast from kath on Vimeo

my sister is visiting for Easter weekend and cooked a roast lamb. so there's food in the house! very tasty

trying final cut express too - the quality seems better but the file sizes are quite large. will test some more

11/04/2009
day 6 - saturday
#videobloggingweek
#videobloggingweek2009

blog post @ http://www.aliak.com/content/videobloggingweek2009-day6-easter-roast